A recipe can generally be defined as a list of ingredients and a set of directions for making or preparing some type of food. Recipes are commonly used by both amateur and expert cooks and other types of food preparers to make or prepare items or types of food. Historically, recipes were gathered together in cookbooks, which are books of collections of different recipes. Alternatively, many cooks and food preparers keep recipes on cards, either professionally or manually prepared, and organize the cards in recipe boxes or holders.
With the increasing popularity of computer technology, however, recipes are now frequently maintained in computerized form. Originally, recipes were maintained only in special recipe-oriented computer programs, or general-purpose database or spreadsheet computer programs. These programs may allow users to add their own recipes for storage on the computer, and/or may come with a large number of predefined recipes, thus supplanting traditional cookbooks. The programs may be run on single computers, or may be run over a network. For example, the recipes themselves may be stored on one computer, or on a network-attached storage (NAS) device, and be accessed by other computers on the network.
More recently, recipe storage and access over the Internet has become popular. There are a number of world-wide web (WWW) sites that cater to recipes. A user accesses such web sites using a web browser program on his or her computer or other type of computing device, and thus accesses the recipes through the web sites. The recipes themselves are stored on a server computer or other type of computing device at a remote location hosted by the organization that owns the web site, or which is associated with the web site owner. Having recipes accessible over the Internet enables a large number of users to access the recipes stored on recipe-oriented web sites simultaneously, and can also allow users to more easily share recipes with other like-minded users.